Abstract: 

Extracting texts of various sizes, shapes, and orientations from images containing multiple objects is an important problem in many contexts, especially, in connection to e-commerce, augmented reality assistance system in a natural scene, content moderation in social media platforms, etc. The text from the image can be a richer and more accurate source of data than human inputs which can be used in several applications like Attribute Extraction, Profanity Checks, etc.

Typically, Extracting Text is achieved in 2 stages:
- Text detection: this module helps to know the regions in the input image where the text is present.
- Text recognition: given the regions in the image where the text is present, this module gives the raw text out of it.

In this session, I will be talking about the Character level Text Detection for detecting normal and arbitrary shaped texts. Later will be discussing the CRNN-CTC network & the need for CTC loss to obtain the raw text from the images.

Bio: 

Rajesh Shreedhar Bhat is working as a Data Scientist at Walmart Labs, Bangalore. His work is primarily focused on building reusable machine/deep learning solutions that can be used across various business domains at Walmart. He completed his Bachelor's degree from PESIT, Bangalore, and currently pursuing his MS in CS with ML specialization from Arizona State University.
He has a couple of research publications in the field of NLP and vision, which are published at top tier conferences such as CoNLL, ASONAM, etc.. and he has filed 6 US patents in Retail space leveraging AI & ML. He is a Kaggle Expert(World Rank 966/122431) with 3 silver and 2 bronze medals and has been a selected as a speaker in highly recognized conferences/meetups such as O'Reilly Strata Data & AI Conference, Spark AI Summit, California, Data Hack Summit, Kaggle days meet up - Senior Track, etc.
Apart from this, Rajesh is a mentor for Udacity Deep learning & Data Scientist Nanodegree programs for the past 3 years and has conducted ML & DL workshops in GE Healthcare, IIIT Kancheepuram, and many other places.